Friday, 21 October 2016

What is Referral spam and its Possible Solutions?

Google Analytics reports are plagued by the presence of referral spam in recent times and this is not only irritating but alarming too. Though it sounds pretty harmless, referral spam has grown into alarming proportions too. Referral spam is the method of distributing bogus referral traffic to a product or a website. Having to deal with referral spam on a daily basis on opening the Google Analytics report.

We are a leading Digital marketing Company in Mumbai and pay a lot of attention to this growing menace and its associated dangers. Let us delve deeper in understanding this issue and its possible solutions:

The two main harbingers of referral spam are unsolicited web crawlers and ghost referral traffic. Ghost referral traffic which supersedes others in this category, does not actually visit the website. This traffic is generated by using a fake HTTP request which is aimed at various Google Analytics properties thus diverting the traffic to your site. It is also used to spoof false events and organic searches too. As an alert provider of web designing services in Mumbai, we are careful to keep referral spam away using various methods. Spam driven Web crawlers visit a website without identifying themselves as robots (which web crawlers are) and show up in reports as having 0 duration and 100% bounce rate.

There are many solutions to remove referral spam. For example, Filtering spam crawlers and eliminate foreign host-names: Ghost referrals almost always have an inaccurate host-name attribution and knowing this a filter that will include data with a perfect host-name. Filtering all possible spam sources is another way of removing it and this filter can be used by any Web development company in Mumbai to keep referral spam at bay.